'Caniba' Examines A Cannibal, His Brother And The Darkest Corners Of Human Sexuality

Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who killed and ate a classmate in 1981, in the new documentary film 'CANIBA'Grasshopper Film

In June of 1981, a 32-year-old Japanese doctoral student at the Sorbonne named Issei Sagawa shot his Dutch classmate, Renée Hartevelt, over a study session at his Paris apartment and spent the next two days eating her corpse. When she began to decompose, he stuffed the rest of her remains into two suitcases and discarded them in the Bois de Boulogne. Declared unfit to stand trial, Issei returned home to Japan, where he has lived as a free man ever since, writing books, drawing manga and even starring in pornographic films in which he reenacts his crime as well as other acts on the fringes of socially acceptable sexual behavior.

Caniba, a new film from the filmmakers Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, tells Issei's story in a way that hasn't been done in the 37 years since the "incident" in Paris, as his brother, Jun, innocuously calls it. Dispensing with traditional narrative structures and any third-party commentary on Issei's crime or even cannibalism itself, the filmmakers take a more ethnographic approach. What emerges is a complex, highly unsettling and, at times, revelatory examination of two brothers, their darkest and most uncontrollable impulses, and their relationship, which like many sibling relationships, seems to consist in an uneasy combination of rivalry, kinship, disdain and love.

Caniba opens with a tight shot of Issei's face, with his brother's just out of focus and uncomfortably close in the background. The effect flattens the two men into a single plane, the lens focusing on one while blurring the other, and vice versa, irrespective of who is speaking. The shot feels interminable, as many throughout the 92-minute film do. The filmmakers don't linger so much as sit with their subjects, trading narrative advancement for unnerving psychological and physical intimacy. This is not a documentary about a crime, but a cinematic exploration of two states of mind.

In that first vignette, Issei, now old and infirm in the aftermath of a stroke, attempts to explain his ultimate fantasy. "I want Renée to eat me because I ate Renée," he says of the woman he murdered and consumed nearly four decades ago. "I haven't worked out all the details yet." He's laconic and heavily medicated. Jun interrogates him, gently, with an air of pious superiority, the "normal" brother questioning his sibling's motives. "Did you think about how scared she was?" he asks. Issei responds, "Can I have some chocolate?"

The exchange lasts for at least 20 minutes, with long pauses that allow time to study Issei's deadened eyes, the pores of his skin, his tremoring hand. We soon learn that Jun's incredulity is merely a performance, a mask he wears to disguise just how similar to his brother he really is.

Over clips of grainy home movies, Jun explains that they grew up in mid-20th Century Japan with two parents who loved paintings, particularly Renoir, and cute animals. "That's our common ground," he says. They especially loved Disney. When Issei returned from France, Jun gave him a stuffed animal named Mr. Beaver to "console him." As old men, they continue to inhabit a shared reality at once grotesque and tragically, inescapably human.

"It's a strange, strange perversion," Jun says of his own uncontrollable urges, which are kept hidden well into the film, and not just from the audience, but from Issei. Jun adds, "I'll probably die not knowing why I have it, or if there is anyone else like me." Issei, meanwhile, appears unfazed by his brother's revelation. "I have crazy propensity," he says. "Whatever you do, brother, pales in comparison." It does, and it doesn't. Jun's propensities are, in some ways, just as alarming, if only for their visceral treatment in the film, both visually and aurally. Issei's cannibalism, on the other hand, is told through stories and Issei's own drawings, making them perhaps more palatable on screen, if more horrifying to ponder.

The filmmakers, who are both part of Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab, say they wanted to avoid judging Issei or Jun in the film, or create a "masquerade out of humanity's voyeuristic attraction to the grotesque," as most journalistic treatments of Issei, in particular, have done. Instead, they wanted to "treat cannibalistic desire and acts with the unnerving gravity they deserve," as a "litmus test of cultural relativism" and as a "longstanding subject of anthropological inquiry." Cannibalism, they note, was once commonplace across the Americas, Australia, Asia and Europe. As such, it is therefore part of humanity's prehistory and, arguably, "the repressed preternatural longings of us all."

This deep subtext combined with Caniba's pacing and lack of a traditional structure makes for very difficult viewing, but it nevertheless offers a profound and disturbing experience. As Issei and Jun flip through the pages of Issei's gruesome, graphic manga drawings of his crime, Jun seems to laugh, even as he repeatedly declares that he can't take any more. It's unlikely that anyone who sees the film will laugh, even a little, but like Jun contemplating his brother's drawings, it's equally unlikely that theywill look away.

In New York, Caniba will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, from October 19th through the 28th.

I am a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and professor. I have covered contemporary art and film since the late 1990s, and have taught journalism and film courses at the college level since 2004.